Hands on with the Lenovo Yoga Tablet: lopsided design and 18 hour runtime

$249 for the 8-inch version and $299 for the 10-inch version, launching Oct. 30.

Lenovo held a media event in New York today where it announced the Yoga Tablet, an oddly designed Android device with a cylindrical bulge on one side. This bulge is actually a huge battery, which Lenovo says should give the tablet 18 hours of battery life.

The Yoga Tablet is very much a budget device. There are 8- and 10-inch varieties, priced at $249 and $299 respectively. These come with a 1.6MP front and 5MP rear camera, 16 or 32GB of storage, and Android 4.2. And the specs and design of both sizes are identical: a 1.2 GHz quad-core Mediatek processor, 1GB of ram, and a 1280x800 screen. It's worth noting Google destroys those specs at a similar price point. Heck, last year's Nexus 7 had better specs than this at a cheaper price. Google may have Play Store revenues to fall back on, but that is of no concern to an end user.

This should come as a surprise to no one, but with specs like that, performance is best described as "bad." Nothing really scrolls smoothly, every animation lags—the whole device is a slow mess. The outsides are just as cheap as the insides: the Yoga Tablet is coated in a silver flake plastic that looks like something from a 90s Radio Shack shelf. There's no soft-touch backing to be found here, meaning the Yoga is easily outclassed by any Samsung or Google tablet.

Lenovo's big selling point for this device, besides the all-day battery life, is the integrated kickstand in the battery bump. A quick flip out, and the device can stand up in two different configurations—one is completely upright, and the other sits at a more horizontal angle. When standing up, the device is sturdy and bottom-heavy enough to use without it falling over. Using it in portrait mode on a table, which I do quite frequently with my Nexus 7, is a bit more of an awkward proposition. It's always going to be tilted over to one side.

While the 8-inch version is an inch bigger than the Nexus 7, it's hard to imagine why anyone would pick the more expensive Yoga over Google's tablet. The Nexus 7 has a lower price, a faster processor, better build quality and materials, a brighter, higher resolution screen, and a newer version of Android. You'll be losing out on an inch of screen real estate (not necessarily a bad thing), and you'll lose a few hours of battery life. The 10-inch version has a slightly better chance in the market thanks to the $300 price tag, but then you are dealing with a 150ppi screen. Either one is going to be a tough sell for the PC OEMs. The 8- and 10-inch Yogas launch tomorrow, October 30, at the usual electronics dealers.

Ron Amadeo
Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work. Emailron.amadeo@arstechnica.com//Twitter@RonAmadeo

This is a nice idea with the design, I have several times felt like the flat slate format could be improved with a section for grip, and by containing the battery and pcb there it should allow the screen portion to be very light. So that when holding the device one handed the center of mass in or very close to the hand meaning it will feel comfortable to hold for long periods.

But why pair an innovative design with the crappiest hardware imaginable? If you've invested the effort into the design, put in something competitive at least...

The pathetic HW is the injury, the price is just insulting. I would really like to understand where the money went in this, it certainly wasn't the HW.

That's what Lenovo had been hyping up, with all those "There's a Better Way" videos? Their "better way" is a low end tablet with a big ol' battery and a flimsy kickstand? When they said "better way" I thought it would be some new innovative design like the Yoga laptops were, but nope it's just a kickstand.

They would almost certainly lose less money by scrapping the whole project instead of letting it going into production. Not to mention the damage to the brand when the buyers realized they've paid $150 more than they should for this kind of HW.

Our Lenovo rep has been heavily marketing this, with very Apple-style marketing... including an ad campaign featuring Ashton Kutcher looking very Jobs-like, and the slogan of "the angle changes everything".

I really don't know who had the bright idea of having Kutcher film a Jobs-style keynote to launch the product... but it just comes off as absurd.

They've been trying to sell the idea that the "cylinder" spine is the perfect ergonomic solution for users who are doing data-entry on the go, because they can hold on to the battery and not drop the tablet. I can see that being an advantage. It makes sense in business settings, as tablets are being increasingly used as "digital clipboards".

Yet the industrial design is seriously budget-looking and the specs are ridiculously lacklustre. I can't see any sense in actually buying one of these things.

At some point during the design of the Yoga, there was probably a very good product on the drawing board. It just seems to have been made to a price-point that has ruined any potential that the product had. Which is a shame... at their best, Lenovo can actually produce some decent designs that make the best of their Thinkpad heritage.

Isn't it sad when a freaking 1.2GHz QUAD-core CPU with a full gigabyte of RAM is regarded as "low end" for what is basically a big-screened mobile phone?

How can performance be poor with those specs? My current Android phone is a 1GHz single core with 512mb RAM and it doesn't usually feel too laggy. If the Yoga is slow, then shame on Lenovo - maybe they hired too many Motorola software engineers.

Isn't it sad when a freaking 1.2GHz QUAD-core CPU with a full gigabyte of RAM is regarded as "low end" for what is basically a big-screened mobile phone?

How can performance be poor with those specs? My current Android phone is a 1GHz single core with 512mb RAM and it doesn't usually feel too laggy. If the Yoga is slow, then shame on Lenovo - maybe they hired too many Motorola software engineers.

Seriously, this part of the review caught my eye as well. MS can get an NT-based Windows derivative running like absolute silk on old dual-cores (say Lumia 920) and yet a quad with twice the memory can't run Android without the author saying "Nothing really scrolls smoothly, every animation lags—the whole device is a slow mess."?? Lenovo must be seriously incompetent, or else the state of Android is even worse than I'd heard.

Edit: To be clear, not trying to start a fight about mobile OSs - it just seems really odd given what competitors have been able to achieve.

Isn't it sad when a freaking 1.2GHz QUAD-core CPU with a full gigabyte of RAM is regarded as "low end" for what is basically a big-screened mobile phone?

How can performance be poor with those specs? My current Android phone is a 1GHz single core with 512mb RAM and it doesn't usually feel too laggy. If the Yoga is slow, then shame on Lenovo - maybe they hired too many Motorola software engineers.

Seriously, this part of the review caught my eye as well. MS can get an NT-based Windows derivative running like absolute silk on old dual-cores (say Lumia 920) and yet a quad with twice the memory can't run Android without the author saying "Nothing really scrolls smoothly, every animation lags—the whole device is a slow mess."?? Lenovo must be seriously incompetent, or else the state of Android is even worse than I'd heard.

Edit: To be clear, not trying to start a fight about mobile OSs - it just seems really odd given what competitors have been able to achieve.

The CPU is almost certain based on Cortex-7A, which clock-for-clock runs quite a bit slower than an equivalent Cortex-A8/A9 CPUs. In fact the just announced MediaTek (real) oct core CPU performs worse than Snapdragon 600.

Basically the slowness comes down to:1. The aggregate performance of this CPU is definitely worse than current gen quad core CPU2. All the graphics are done on a single core, so the low performance of a core will hurt graphics, regardless how many cores they throw at it3. They probably cheap out on the GPU, touch screen, and storage speed as well, all which has major repercussions for responsiveness

I really don't know who had the bright idea of having Kutcher film a Jobs-style keynote to launch the product... but it just comes off as absurd.

So it's Apple-style marketing & pricing coupled with China-style quality, what can go wrong with this setup?

Buh? Since when did Apple hire a professional actor to do its keynotes, other than never? Kutcher played Jobs in a movie. And elsewhere, Apple's marketing style is to under promise and over deliver. This POS is *not* Apple-style marketing.

Dude... Ron, you're preview is AWESOME. "What the shit is this?" is something hardware specialists rarely ever say. And unlike the Assassin's Creed 4 review over to the right you know what you're talking about!

Doesn't seem like a good deal at all, but I wish other tablet makers would invest in battery life. I don't need mine to weigh <500g or have >300DPI, but 18 hours of real world battery life would be great. If I could get a current gen SoC and storage with a quality 1280x800 display and an oversized battery, I'd be OK with it weighing even a bit more than my old TF101 (680g).

But why pair an innovative design with the crappiest hardware imaginable? If you've invested the effort into the design, put in something competitive at least...

To save costs?

By keeping the price low perhaps Lenovo were targeting the type of customer who knows or cares little about the internals, but is seduced by the sticker price and "Oooh it's got an interesting stand type thingy"

Lenovo had a chance to make something great.Take this design, with better build quality, a 1080p IPS screen, a Snapdragon 800 and 2-3 GB of RAM and I would've paid $500 for the 10-incher.As it stands, I would rather get the Nexus 7 or wait for the new Nexus 10.

Lenovo had a chance to make something great.Take this design, with better build quality, a 1080p IPS screen, a Snapdragon 800 and 2-3 GB of RAM and I would've paid $500 for the 10-incher.As it stands, I would rather get the Nexus 7 or wait for the new Nexus 10.

I think the market for $500 tablets that aren't iPads is somewhat limited.

Buh? Since when did Apple hire a professional actor to do its keynotes, other than never? Kutcher played Jobs in a movie. And elsewhere, Apple's marketing style is to under promise and over deliver. This POS is *not* Apple-style marketing.

By Apple-style marketing I mean appealing to the premium crowd, I am pretty sure they didn't hire Kutcher to appeal to Kutcher's fans.

And I didn't realize calling a product "magical" over and over again is a form of "under promise", last I used an iPad I didn't have a rainbow fart, where's the magic promised to me?! /jk

I think Lenovo isn't as good as, well, they (and others) think they are. They got handed the ThinkPad T- and X-Series by IBM and it's doing well enough despite their tender loving care.

Just about everything else is either a surprise hit (like the Yoga ultrabooks), a phone-in (most IdeaPads or any ThinkCentre), or a serious lapse in judgement (the Helix, this tablet). Lenovo is rather like Samsung in that respect: trading more on mindshare and the reputation of a couple hits, rather than holistic competence.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a long-time ThinkPad devotee (T20, T60, T61p, currently a W530) but the attention to detail isn't there under Lenovo's care, and the recent brand-diluting missteps with the T- and X-Series show that they really don't care.

Isn't it sad when a freaking 1.2GHz QUAD-core CPU with a full gigabyte of RAM is regarded as "low end" for what is basically a big-screened mobile phone?

How can performance be poor with those specs? My current Android phone is a 1GHz single core with 512mb RAM and it doesn't usually feel too laggy. If the Yoga is slow, then shame on Lenovo - maybe they hired too many Motorola software engineers.

It's a quad a7 with a slow powervr gpu. Not all quads are made equal.

I like the general idea of the device. It's nice to see OEMs trying to make netbooks that are not exclusively chromebooks. But it has nearly identical specs to the Asus MEMO pad HD which can be had for as little as 130-150$. And the MEMO pad is quite decent. Mediocre performance are a lot more fogiveable in an inexpensive device.

Lenovo had a chance to make something great.Take this design, with better build quality, a 1080p IPS screen, a Snapdragon 800 and 2-3 GB of RAM and I would've paid $500 for the 10-incher.As it stands, I would rather get the Nexus 7 or wait for the new Nexus 10.

If you are willing to fork over 4-500$ for a quality Android convertible you should look into the Slatebook X2 or the soon-to-come new Asus Transformer Pad.

Lenovo had a chance to make something great.Take this design, with better build quality, a 1080p IPS screen, a Snapdragon 800 and 2-3 GB of RAM and I would've paid $500 for the 10-incher.As it stands, I would rather get the Nexus 7 or wait for the new Nexus 10.

If you are willing to fork over 4-500$ for a quality Android convertible you should look into the Slatebook X2 or the soon-to-come new Asus Transformer Pad.

The new Asus is also on my watchlist, but I'm not getting a table for a couple of months, so I'll have a while to see what comes out until then.

Seriously, I would not buy another Android tablet from Lenovo. I got a S2109A last year, their support is non-existent. No updates since last December. There is a thread on Lenovo forum and everyone is mad. They literally deserted us after they had our money. Burnt once is enough.

The CPU is almost certain based on Cortex-7A, which clock-for-clock runs quite a bit slower than an equivalent Cortex-A8/A9 CPUs. In fact the just announced MediaTek (real) oct core CPU performs worse than Snapdragon 600.

That's a nice data point on the performance of the Cortex-A7 core. 8 1.7-GHz Cortex-A7 cores performs about the same as a 4 1.7-GHz Krait 300 cores, therefore the Cortex-A7 is about half as fast per core per Hz as a Krait. Also, the reported DMIPS for the Cortex-A7 is 1.9 DMIPS/MHz. Cortex-A8 is 2.0. Cortex-A9 is 2.5. Cortex-A15 is 3.5. Krait is around 3.3. So somewhere around 0.5x to 0.6x that of Krait in DMIPS.

A 1.2 GHz quad Cortex-A7 is like running a 600 MHz quad Snapdragon 600. It's even worse really, as single threaded performance is the big driver with software being so single threaded dominant. It basically performs like an iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre, the original Droid. 2009 era devices.

Name collision confusion will reign if we have to talk about Apple A7 and Cortex-A7 at the same time. Ugh.

A 1.2 GHz quad Cortex-A7 is like running a 600 MHz quad Snapdragon 600. It's even worse really, as single threaded performance is the big driver with software being so single threaded dominant. It basically performs like an iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre, the original Droid. 2009 era devices.

Exactly. As an Android dev I'll be the first to testify that as long as performance is adequate, absolutely no effort is given to utilize more than one core.Apple's choice of two very powerful cores is much more sensible in my opinion, one for the currently running app, the other for the OS and other bg processes. Apple keeps costs down, devs don't have to figure out how to use four let along eight frigging cores, and consumers enjoy snappy apps, it's just win-win-win.

At what point do shitty Android tablets become a discussion of how Google is killing the market for Android tablets by undercutting the market with their Nexus tablets?

If Lenovo wants to compete with a Nexus 7, what other options do they have but to cut corners unacceptably?

My thoughts exactly. My first thought (and those of people I know) is "wow, you get much better value with a Nexus 7." Of course you do; Google's not making money off the hardware, and the OEMs have to. I'd rather see Google making aspirational-but-overpriced halo hardware like the Surface lineup than undercutting all the OEMs (and thus preventing real competition and innovation by the OEMs) by pricing their tablets like the highly-subsidized Kindles.